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Monday, September 25, 2006
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 WHEREUPON MR. BILL FLIPS THE FUCK OUT - UPDATED
A lot of people decry Fox News' penchant for the sensationalistic and the asanine. I happen to love it. John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly are studies in stupidity. And for that, I shall love Fox News until that good day when I die. If only my cable provider didn't want me to make me pay through the nose for, I might actually watch it more.
But you have to give Fox credit for one thing, they sure know how to make former President Bill Clinton angry. And a decidedly Bill Bixby-esque angry to boot.
Clinton is actually famous for his temper. The memoirs of his former aide, George Stephanopolous, All Too Human, read like the love letters of a battered wife, so frequently were the Clintonian tirades directed at young George. President Clinton went off on "purple-faced rages" seemingly every 35 seconds for eight years. Christ, according to Dick Morris, he would engage his aides in fist-fights from time to time. The trick was getting him to do it in public, and very few people ever managed that.
In an interview broadcast yesterday, Chris Wallace succeeded where so many others have failed.
Wanna see? Of course you do.
In a combative interview on "Fox News Sunday," former President Clinton defended his handling of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden, saying he tried to have bin Laden killed and was attacked for his efforts by the same people who now criticize him for not doing enough.
"That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now," Clinton said in the interview. "They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try, they did not try."
Clinton accused host Chris Wallace of a "conservative hit job" and asked: "I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked, 'Why didn't you do anything about the Cole?' I want to know how many people you asked, 'Why did you fire Dick Clarke?'"
During the interview, President Clinton invited Mr. Wallace to read Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, no fewer than 11 times.
Well, I have read it. And while it is a stinging indictment against the Bush administration's pre-9/11 attitude toward terrorism, it isn't exactly complimentary toward Mr. Clinton. It really isn't a long book, and I suggest that you read it if you haven't. You'll learn all manner of neat stuff, both about America's impotence in the face of twenty years of terror attacks and the true size and dimensions of Richard Clarke's formidible ego.
Among Clarke's conclusions was that President Clinton was indeed distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and that this affected his judgement in eliminating Osama bin Laden in August of 1998. So stung was he by the "wag the dog" criticism that he did little about al-Qaeda for the balance of his presidency. In fact, he never even mentioned bin Laden by name in public between August 21, 1998 and Sepember 12, 2001.
Furthermore, President Bush did not fire Clarke. Clarke resigned after transferring from the White House Office of Counter-Terrorism to work on Internet Security for the administration. Dick Clarke has what can only be described as an acrimonious relationship with the current president, but neither has ever suggested that he was fired. Only President Clinton has said that.
It is odd that the former president is so insistent on demanding answers on why his successor did not retaliate against bin Laden for the Cole bombing. The Cole was attacked on 12 October, 2000, when the occupant of the Oval Office was William Jefferson Clinton. Clinton would continue to be Commander in Chief for three months and eight days thereafter, yet he took no retaliatory action against al-Qaeda. None whatsoever.
Mr. Clinton says this is because he couldn't get the FBI and CIA to certify that bin Laden was responsible for the bombing. Seemingly, Clinton forgets exactly who works for whom in that relationship. A lack of concrete evidence certainly didn't stop the president from launching cruise missiles at that "chemical weapons plant" in Sudan. Despite Mr. Clinton's assertions to the contrary, there is no evidence that the plant was anything but what the Sudanese said it was - a pharmaceutical factory. No one has ever explained why the government of Sudan would exile Osama bin Laden in 1996, and seize his Sudanese assets - yet allow him to keep his chemical weapons plant running. As soon as he's done demanding that questions be asked of people, I'll hope that he'll address that. However, I fear that hope might be in vain.
The video and transcript of the Clinton interview are fascinating documents. Like virtually everything that comes out of Bill Clinton's mouth, the interview was riddled with half-truths and outright lies.
He began almost immediately in discussing the Somolia operation.
CLINTON: OK, let's talk about it. Now, I will answer all those things on the merits, but first I want to talk about the context in which this arises.
I'm being asked this on the FOX network. ABC just had a right- wing conservative run in their little "Pathway to 9/11," falsely claiming it was based on the 9/11 Commission report, with three things asserted against me directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report.
And I think it's very interesting that all the conservative Republicans, who now say I didn't do enough, claimed that I was too obsessed with bin Laden. All of President Bush's neo-cons thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden. They had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office. All the right-wingers who now say I didn't do enough said I did too much -- same people.
They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in "Black Hawk down," and I refused to do it and stayed six months and had an orderly transfer to the United Nations.
OK, now let's look at all the criticisms: Black Hawk down, Somalia. There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Usama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk down or was paying any attention to it or even knew Al Qaeda was a growing concern in October of '93.
WALLACE: I understand, and I ...
CLINTON: No, wait. No, wait. Don't tell me this -- you asked me why didn't I do more to bin Laden. There was not a living soul. All the people who now criticize me wanted to leave the next day.
You brought this up, so you'll get an answer, but you can't ...
WALLACE: I'm perfectly happy to.
CLINTON: All right, secondly ...
WALLACE: Bin Laden says ...
CLINTON: Bin Laden may have said ...
WALLACE: ... bin Laden says that it showed the weakness of the United States.
CLINTON: But it would've shown the weakness if we'd left right away, but he wasn't involved in that. That's just a bunch of bull. That was about Mohammed Adid, a Muslim warlord, murdering 22 Pakistani Muslim troops. We were all there on a humanitarian mission. We had no mission, none, to establish a certain kind of Somali government or to keep anybody out.
He was not a religious fanatic ...
WALLACE: But, Mr. President ...
CLINTON: ... there was no Al Qaeda ...
WALLACE: ... with respect, if I may, instead of going through '93 and ...
CLINTON: No, no. You asked it. You brought it up. You brought it up.
At best, this is only half true. When the first President Bush sent American troops to Somolia in December of 1992, he did so with a very specific purpose and a very limited timeline. That mission was to deliver food aid to starving peole, turn the operation over to the UN and get out. That's it, that's all. Bush 41 was intereted into transforming Somalia into a duskier Delaware not at all.
The Clinton administration changed that mission. They tooks sides in the civil war and the results were predictable - they became combatants and took casualities. Then they left, humiliated. But it was only after the policy change that Aidid's forces killed the Pakastani troops and Black Hawk Down occurred. While the former president would like you to believe otherwise, Mohammad Aidid did not just flip out one day and decide to murder some Pakastanis and shoot at American helicopters. Those helicopters were actually trying to capture, and possibly kill him. This is something we can understand Aidid objecting to with some vigour.
It wasn't the mission that Republicans objected to, it was the change in it. And none other than Clinton's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, addressed this in his book, My American Journey. According to Stephanopolous' book, Clinton later considered awarding Powell the first fifth star since Omar Bradely recieved it in 1949. That's not exactly something one does for his political enemies.
To listen to President Clinton, you would think that everything he knows about Somolia comes from Mark Bowden's book, Black Hawk Down, and the film of the same name.
And, while I haven't done a Nexus/Lexus search on this, I was paying a considerabe amount of attention to the United States Congress in the 1990's, and I can't remember anyone saying that the president was "too obsessed" with bin Laden. Clinton's obsessions are well-documented, and are not alleged to include overly tall Saudi exiles with deep pockets.
Then it gets even more interesting.
WALLACE: And all I can say is, I'm asking you this in good faith because it's on people's minds, sir. And I wasn't ...
CLINTON: Well, there's a reason it's on people's minds. That's the point I'm trying to make. There's a reason it's on people's minds: Because there's been a serious disinformation campaign to create that impression.
This country only has one person who's worked on this terror. From the terrorist incidents under Reagan to the terrorist incidents from 9/11, only one: Richard Clarke.
And all I can say to anybody is, you want to know what we did wrong or right, or anybody else did? Read his book.
The people on my political right who say I didn't do enough spent the whole time I was president saying, "Why is he so obsessed with bin Laden? That was "wag the dog" when he tried to kill him."
My Republican secretary of defense -- and I think I'm the only president since World War II to have a secretary of defense of the opposite party — Richard Clarke and all the intelligence people said that I ordered a vigorous attempt to get bin Laden and came closer, apparently, than anybody has since.
Um, Mr. President? Robert MacNamara was a Republican, and he was defense secretary to two Democratic presidents, Kennedy and Johnson. Just sayin'. Perhaps a Republican would have a Democratic defense secretary, but that would neccessitate the Democrats not being such crying little girls. Joe Lieberman is available, should President Bush decide to put Don Rumsfeld to sleep in the near future, but his Democratic loyalties are currently the matter of some question.
You'll also notice that Clinton introduced "wag the dog", into the interview, not Wallace.
The timeline certainly is interesting. On August 17, 1998, President Clinton testified before the federal grand jury and admitted his affair with Monica Lewinsky. That night, he gave an address to the American people petulantly doing the same thing again. On August 20, Clinton interrupted getting yelled at by his wife to return to Washington and announce the cruise missile strikes on al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and and Sudan. Those strikes failed and President Clinton never again mentioned bin Laden's name in public before 9/11.
This impression among fair-minded people was compounded by Clinton's strike on Iraq in December of 1998 - the day articles of impeachment were scheduled to be voted on by the House of Representatives. Following his aquittal, President Clinton further responded by the threat posed by Saddam Hussien by bombing Serbia. And Iraq was rarely mentioned again.
Osama bin Laden and Iraq were mortal threats to the United States, according to the former president. But they seemed to be convieniently more dangerous when he was moments of personal political preil. And then they seemingly ceased to exist. I might be the only one who feels bombing a homocidal monster like Slobodan Milosovic to be inconsistent with an "obsession with bin Laden," but I'm a pretty weird guy. Ask anyone.
I don't like to believe that an American president would play "wag the dog," but Bill Clinton's actions have at least made that theory plausible. Even if things like perjury, obstruction of justice and witness tampering by a sitting president don't bother you, the fact that President Clinton's love of extra-marital fellatio can cause sincere doubts about the integrity of US foreign policy is all the reason a rational adult should need to support his impeachment.
9/11 must've been a relief to President Clinton, if only because it divereted the world from it's insane obsession with his cock and the magical places it's been. But the deeper you get into the history, the more you find that Bill Clinton's cock turns up in the unlikliest of places - specifically, the ruins of the World Trade Center. It doesn't really matter in the end if he "wagged the dog" or not, but that enough people had a low-enough opinion of his credibility that could honestly believe that he did. Always remeber, this is a man who was referred to as "Slick Willie," by his own friends.
And in that, Bill Clinton damaged the office he held just as seriously as Richard Nixon did. Democrats successfully argued that because the word "penis" makes people giggle, Clinton's scandals weren't as serious as Watergate. Well, they were, and now we're seeing how. Watergate was at least about something serious. It began as a fight over who had the right to leak classified national security imformation and got silly from there. Bill Clinton's scandals were about little more than stroking his crazed ego and his bent penis, but the consequences were just as grave.
President Clinton can point to all the failures of the Bush administration - and there are several - all he likes. But that does nothing to mitigate his own. Nor does it explain what part his own moral failings played in the lapses in policy that were partly responsible for 9/11.
And that, my friends, is not part of a "right wing hit job" by Fox News. That's a fact of history, whether President Clinton likes it or not.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day:Exhuming McCarthy By: R.E.M. From: Document
PermalinkLabels: Fun With Politics
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